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Rock and Rye Syrup
Pure Rye Whisky, 3 pints; Water, 1 pint; Granulated Sugar, 6 lbs. Dissolve by agitation or percolation, and add- Fruit Acid, ½ ounce; Soda Foam, 1 ounce.
Soda water is a matter of taste-in a double sense. Scores of customers lose their thirst when they see a slovenly fountain. Keep your fountain clean.
A fountain syrup rather than a drink: heavy sugar carried in whisky, drawn by the ounce and topped with carbonated water. The proportions are workable, but three of the four ingredients need translating.
- The hinge: dissolve coldThe whole point of "agitation or percolation" is that no heat is used, so the spirit and its aromatics survive. Heating the mixture to speed dissolution drives off alcohol and dulls the rye. Expect a long, patient shake or a slow percolation through the sugar.
- Six pounds in two quartsThat is roughly 2.7 kg of sugar into about 1.9 L of liquid, a very heavy load that sits at or near the limit of what will stay dissolved cold. Yield is close to a US gallon of very dense syrup; at the usual fountain rate of 1 to 1.5 oz per glass it makes something like 90 to 120 drinks.
- "Fruit acid"Trade shorthand for citric or tartaric acid, usually sold as a crystalline powder or a 50 percent stock solution. Half an ounce is about 14 g by weight; if you are using a solution rather than crystals the strength matters, so add it a little at a time and taste.
- "Soda foam"A saponin-based foaming preparation, historically an extract of quillaia (soapbark) or yucca. It is not a flavouring and contributes nothing but head retention. Quillaia extract is still a permitted food additive but only at low, regulated levels, and the period "soda foams" varied wildly in strength; the syrup works without it.
- Pure rye whiskyIn the fountain era this meant a straight rye, frequently at higher than 80 proof and considerably grassier and more assertive than most modern bottlings. A high-rye, bottled-in-bond whiskey stands up best to six pounds of sugar; anything soft or wheat-heavy disappears entirely.
- Alcohol contentThree pints of whisky in about a gallon of finished syrup leaves the syrup itself somewhere near 15 to 18 percent alcohol, and each dispensed glass carries roughly a third of a shot. This is an alcoholic soda, not a flavouring syrup, and selling it involves a licence.
- StorageThe sugar concentration and the spirit together make this effectively self-preserving at room temperature. Keep it stoppered so it does not evaporate and crust at the neck.
Rock and rye began as a druggist's remedy rather than a cocktail: rye whisky sweetened with rock candy, often with lemon, orange peel or horehound added, and sold through the nineteenth century for coughs and colds. Bottled versions were widely advertised by the 1880s, and the flavour was familiar enough that soda fountains, which shared the drugstore counter with the prescription case, offered a syrup version drawn like any other. That is why it sits in a soda book at all — the American fountain of this period was a pharmacy fixture, and the line between a tonic, a medicine and a treat was drawn loosely. The scolding about slovenly fountains is period-typical: fountain manuals returned again and again to cleanliness, partly because customers could see the apparatus and partly because milk and cream syrups standing in a warm shop were a real hazard.